The calls for friendship and amity between Pakistan and India made so loudly on the Wagah border crossing last month have hardly suppressed the Indian urge to hurt the feelings of Pakistanis. On the night before this Eid-ul-Fitr, the Indian troops opened fire on a Pakistani military patrol along the Line of Control, killing three jawans.
The victims had got lost while moving from one post to the other due to bad weather in the Neelam Valley, says ISPR chief Major General Athar Abbas, insisting the Indian firing was entirely unprovoked. The matter was taken up by the area commander with his Indian counterpart, he added. But the Indian side hasn't taken long enough to make a counter-claim saying it was the firing from the Pakistani side in which one of their junior commissioned officers was killed - proving right an age-old adage 'truth is always the first casualty of war'.
The LoC cease-fire violation by the Indian troops is not the first - nor is it expected to be the last as the Kashmiri 'intifada' gains momentum - but what intrigues one is its increased frequency of late after a fairly long spell of relative peace and tranquillity.
The question: What is it that is forcing the Indian side to increase tension along the Line of Control? Not only of late has the Indian army stepped up the LoC violations it has also introduced yet another element to its aggressive posture by deploying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that are fitted with human movement detection devices. If the LoC cease-fire, unilaterally announced by the then president, Pervez Musharraf, as a confidence-building measure, was meant to defuse border tensions that purpose stands defeated.
May be the Indian army has to recover its image as a fighting force after its failure to control the Kashmiri 'intifada', badly soiled as it is in the aftermath of discovery of some 2,000 unmarked graves in the India-occupied Kashmir.
If you have killed some hundred thousand innocent Kashmiri civilians during your posting in the Held Kashmir, if you have buried thousands in unmarked graves, if you have relentlessly persecuted the Kashmiri youth and if you have been desecrating mosques, looting homes and raping women, then your nemesis don't have to come from somewhere else - that comes from sons of the soil. They are Kashmiris by birth and citizenship and they are fighting for their freedom and their right to self-determination.
If all that is going on in the occupied territory is the handiwork of outsiders as the Indian government would like to project, then you don't need some three-quarters of a million soldiers in there. The LoC can be sealed by a division or so and that India has done. But the Indian army is spread all over the place and rightly so because the Kashmiris' fight for freedom is not confined to some small border towns and villages either, it is being waged all over the Kashmir Valley.
When the Pakistani leadership is precariously bending over backwards to keep Indians in good humour, even by agreeing to freeze its principled position on Kashmir, New Delhi has been indifferent, its attitude largely influenced by excessive hubris it has come to acquire as the America's point man in the region.
We need to revisit our position vis-à-vis India; not that we need to be aggressive but we cannot afford to be complacent either. Given that winds of freedom are blowing across the globe, as we see them buffeting many countries in North Africa and the Middle East, there is just no reason why the people of Kashmir should remain unaffected. Already the baton for freedom struggle has passed on to the Kashmir youth and their struggle is bound to draw inspiration and moral strength from the Arab Spring.